I wonder if it will ever see a chance to go mainstream.<p>The memory bottleneck is pretty much the only thing in CPU design that didn't see a dramatic improvement over the years. Its elimination is the only obvious improvement pathway still left with expectation of double digit performance gains.<p>So we need either very big and very fast caches, or extremely wide and low latency memory. Both options are quite costly.<p>Adding on die DRAM that can work at least as fast as 500mhz will surely require some specialty process with a lot of compromises like the one in the article.<p>Gluing something like HBM2 to the die for a second option moves the cost from the specialty process to the specialty packaging. Not much better.
Twelve point two billion transistors. That's absolutely nuts. Does anyone have a ballpark figure for how much a 'drawer' of four of these things costs? What's it supposed to run, is this an Oracle/DB2 beast?
Impressive tech. How big is the market for these machines these days? Like how many Z15 CPs would they expect to sell (assuming each Z15 install can vary a lot in size).
Are there any modern initiatives around mainframe?
What is IBM doing to promote it more to new generations?<p>Are there any startups doing anything related to the mainframe?<p>I was always fascinated by the tech around mainframe and am even thinking about moving into that space.
I can imagine that a barrier to entry is high... or?